The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
the family-size decisions of people in these countries. But we can affect our own consumption habits, which are putting a greater incremental strain (at lease onethird) on the world's food...
...But within a few scenes it is apparent that they do not speak the same language, and each is going to have great difficulty learning the language that the other does speak...
...The film is on the one hand little more than some dramatic scenes...
...But soon Johan's way of talking begins to lose its effectiveness...
...In large measure the impact that Scenes lrom a Marriage has had on its audience results from the role that Marianne plays in the film...
...When they are reunited for the first time after he has broken up their marriage by deserting her, she reads him passages of free association from a diary she now keeps at the suggestion of a therapist she is seeing...
...All the words that are used come, after all, from her...
...In that interview with which the film opens, Johan does almost all the talking...
...In the latter scene Marianne wakes up jibbering from a bad dream, and Johan comforts her until she is calm enough to go back to sleep...
...Without the American farmer's fantastic productivity we could not even discuss the possibility of averting world famine...
...What is needed is decisive leadership by President Ford, listening more to his conscience and his compassion than to his inflation-blinded economic advisers, and a continuing campaign of public education on this issue, capitalizing on the reporting already done, to assure the President of the support of the American people...
...She is the one who wrote the diary and the one who drafted the divorce settlement...
...Ludlow Kravis, 8 Waterway, Manhasset, N.Y...
...It is a Commonweal: 269 lot like scenes from a stage play in this respect, and we are reminded that Bergman is, besides a film director, a director of the Royal Theater in Stockholm...
...9 All this is said not in condemnation of the United States, but to appeal to our collective conscience...
...It was a grueling experience, watching that film, though in the end one felt somehow glad to be alive--not in the sense of being full of optimism, certainly, but just in the sense of being glad to have survived the experience...
...Like people that had suddenly found themselves going over rapids in a flimsy boat, we were all hanging onto each other with a startled mixture of exhilaration and dread...
...Affirmative American participation is essential for such a result...
...He has caught the essence of a central drama of our time...
...When she finally pipes up, her remarks are far more hesitant, tentative and uncertain than his...
...Among the sorts of emotional language that the film deals with is poetry...
...Although it is originally Johan who wants to leave her, the film is much more the story of her struggle to be free of him...
...The lines of communication remain crossed, snarled, for he falls asleep while she is reading him the diary, and she becomes impatient and hostile when he begins studying the divorce agreement...
...Yet there is a profound difference in the experience each is undergoing in these two scenes because it is apparent that only one of them is truly at a loss for words: Johan...
...Behind the rhetoric of the delegates of 130 nations assembled in Rome that is what the World Food Conference was about...
...They are in our view of them almost entirely isolated and alone...
...Unless the immediate follow-up is action on this human problem that faces the world now, the conference's plans for the future will turn to ashes, the effort will have been a costly failure, and we will have dependence without end...
...20 December 1974:270...
...Indeed, one way to think about this entire movie is as a drama in which a woman finds her tongue while her husband is losing his...
...But there is a limit to the satisfaction of the consumers' wants and the producers' profit drive...
...The director, Father V. Chathaparampil, has begun by distributing grass roots so that these families can grow their fodder around their own houses...
...However much we say about how others must share the responsibility, we remain the breadbasket of the woddmand will be such for some time to come...
...Yet I think we all feel as we watch the film that Bergman has made of it a very powerful social document...
...and where his response in the first scene is to go to sleep, to fall silent, her response in the second is to become more articulate-to tell him for the first time precisely how she feels about him...
...But we can affect our own consumption habits, which are putting a greater incremental strain (at lease onethird) on the world's food supply than any other single factor...
...As we left the theater I think there was a momentary feeling of camaraderie among us, as if we had just been rescued after spending our three hours together circling on a disabled airliner or trapped in a mine on the verge of cave-in...
...I realized that the room was full of couples who were clinging to each other for dear life...
...Originally shot for television as six one-hour episodes, the film has here been edited down, by Bergman himself, to a long feature film...
...Contrarily, some scenes later when she brings him the divorce papers she has drawn up, he pores over them as if he now feels the need to fathom her native language as well...
...Most of these people have an acre of land, and the goal is a cow for every family...
...Total needed is $4,000...
...Johan has at one point shown some poems he wrote to a colleague for approval...
...Perhaps the Chinese are right in saying, as is reported, that the world may not be able to afford a United States...
...PILLOW TALK 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN OO At one point during Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, the emotional state of the audience at the film, and the very theater where I was watching it, unexpectedly came into my mind...
...The dosing scene is an assignation which the same couple has "in a dark house in the middle of the night" seven years after their divorce...
...He is cocky and boastful, and the assumption underlying his banter with the interviewer is that he can speak for both himself and Marianne...
...We put 15 percent of our food in the garbage, consume 35 percent of the world's resources (with 6 percent of its population) discard millions of tons of glass, paper and metal containers, drive gas-guzzling automobiles, squander 15 percent of our fertilizer in ornamental uses, and in the past decade have added the equivalent of the entire diet of an Indian to our individual food consumption...
...Moreover, it was a conference not about an abstraction called hunger, but about the concrete reality of hungry people...
...In this feature-length version of the work, we not only see Johan and Marianne aside from whatever social institutions and background have influenced them, but without the presence of their own children, parents or lovers...
...It is as if she has been trying to talk about herself in a way he will understand...
...This shock of recognition that we have with the film is what makes it seem so much more intense than a mere movie usually does...
...By the end of the film it is Marianne who is doing the talking...
...Shortly after the initial interview Marianne congratulates herself because, unlike friends who have just had a row in their presence, she and Johan "speak the same language...
...If, however, the future vision can be accompanied by an urgent sense of moral responsibility and underscored by an immediate food-aid program for these people as the basic prerequisite of a total onslaught on this age-old scourge, the Rome Conference may be judged a historic turning point in establishing a new and orderly system in its realm of food policy and action that will endure for generations...
...We should not fail the global trust of which Secretary Kissinger spoke...
...All that happens in the film, really, is talk...
...11030, has agreed to collect and forward all funds designated FOOD PRODUCTION CAMPAIGN...
...To whom much has been given much will be required...
...We waste, we overconsume (except in our own poverty sectors) and we boast about it...
...But the English-language title is good nonetheless because of the pun on "scenes...
...For instance, he is a psychologist by profession while she is a lawyer...
...The Conference was a beginning, not an end...
...On the other hand, the film also presents scenes in the emotional sensemin the sense of "having a scene"--and in this regard it is a completely coherent, self-contained, finished event...
...Bergman provides almost no social context for the drama we see here...
...That limit is the requirement of justice, a just world order, a just distribution of the fruits of God's creation...
...Thanks for the talk," she says--it is her last line in the film--and the remark is indeed a fitting conclusion for the movie we have seen...
...He needs funds for cattle, insemination and the services of a veterinary and an agricultural graduate for a year...
...Without the American consumer the incentive for both agricultural productivity and technological advance would not be present...
...We have to act now: no more grain is going to become available here this year, there is no harvest in the less developed countries until late spring, and every passing day sees more grain committed to commercial purchasers...
...AN APPEAL--In rural Kerala, South India, a peasant's cooperative seeks to expand the productivity and selfsupport of some thousand Panchayath families...
...One felt as if the whole theater were going over these rapids, and might shake apart at any moment from the sheer force of what we saw before us on the screen...
...If these "scenes" have any structure, any overall development as a drama, that struggle is it...
...Neither of them succeeds in getting through to the other in these scenes...
...The film becomes the chronicle of her liberation from him, with all the connotations of sexual politics that the term liberation implies...
...This is what makes Scenes froth a Marriage such a distressing, exciting, exhausting experience to sit through...
...Between these first and last scenes the film rehearses for us every language of love conceivable, every variety of talk about human emotions...
...While he was spokesman during the interview at the beginning, she is having her say at the end...
...It is only a rough working up of an idea for a play in the same way that life itself is just an improvisation on an idea which would need much more refinement and polish to succeed on the stage...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...I suspect that the original Swedish title of the film was something other than Scenes from a Marriage, which seems intended partly as an apology for the fragmentary state in which we are seeing the work...
...We sense in the film some shaking of the foundations which we have been feeling in our own lives lately, and as a consequence we identify very strongly with the characters whether we want to or not...
...There is much evidence that a citizenry tired of Vietnam and Watergate would respond to an appeal for a positive effort--almost a moral crusade-and it would be in the finest, most generous American tradition...
...But the colleague cannot help expressing the galling opinion that his poems are only mediocre, and the incident is typical of the fate that Johan's efforts at self-assertion suffer...
...As she strives to put into words that bad dream she has had, Johan for once sits thoughtfully, quietly, listening to her...
...The opening scene from this marriage is an interview which a magazine feature writer is conducting with an ideal husband and wife, Johart (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Lie UUman...
...without American technology we could not envision the kind of improvement of developing-country agriculture that the World Food Conference calls for...
Vol. 101 • December 1974 • No. 10
